Bosses And Listening

It's Confirmed: Bosses Really Don't Listen To Workers

Maybe Horrible Bosses wasn’t such an exaggerated depiction of reality after all.

A new study published by Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Process has concluded that bosses don’t listen. Worse yet, the more power the boss has, the less likely he is to listen. In other words, don’t expect much to come from those ideas you put in the suggestion box.

Data was collected on more than 200 managers as well as coworkers, and the results showed that the more power the bosses had, the more confidence they had in themselves — we’ll call it arrogance — to make their own decisions and block out input from anyone else. It stemmed from the fact that taking advice from others is perceived as a weakness, which is kind of like how men never ask for directions.

But the best part comes from a coordinated part of the experiment where students were given various levels of power and asked to make key decisions. The results showed that the managers who welcomed the least amount of advice and input were, in fact, the least accurate.